'Beastly to America': Conservative reveals how this key Trump policy has already failed

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Democratic Republic of the Congo's Foreign Minister Therese Kayikwamba Wagner and Rwanda's Foreign Minister Olivier Nduhungirehe in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington D.C., June 27, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno/File Photo

Opponents of President Donald Trump's trade policy argue that he has no business imposing steep new tariffs on a range of countries without Congress having a full vote. And the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on the matter.

In his September 10 column, conservative Washington Post opinion writer George Will examines the history of protectionism in the United States — stressing that fear of foreign competition is nothing new and taking a negative view of the Trump administration's trade policy.

"Somehow, New England thrived despite the end of whaling, the southward migration of the textile industry, the departure of many shoemakers, and other supposed setbacks," the 84-year-old Will writes. "Protectionists, however, persist in imagining recent calamities that they think validate government curtailments of economic freedom. Hence their lingering preoccupation with the 'China shock,' the alleged damage done to American industries and communities by imports from China."

The Never Trump conservative continues, "Today, the president's long list of nations being beastly to America includes mighty Switzerland, which he has threatened with stratospheric tariffs. Because it has pushed upon Americans' unconscionable amounts of chocolates and wristwatches?"

Will makes his anti-protectionist point by going way back in U.S. history and describing the competing arguments of protectionist Secretary of State Henry Clay (who served under President John Quincy Adams from 1825-1829 after serving in the U.S. Senate via Kentucky) and Sen. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts (a Whig who went on to serve as secretary of state under President Millard Fillmore before his death in 1852).

Will quotes Webster as saying, "Commerce is not a gambling among nations for a stake, to be won by some and lost by others.… All parties gain, all parties make profits, all parties grow rich, by the operations of just and liberal commerce ... If the world had but one clime and but one soil, if all men had the same wants and the same means ... then, indeed, what one obtained from the other by exchange would injure one party in the same degree that it benefited the other."

George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).